Over the last two years, through all the cultural and political convulsions that have arisen out of Israel’s destruction of Gaza – a campaign of mass slaughter carried out with the more or less steadfast assistance and support of powerful western governments – a particular expression has come to characterise the response of those of us who have opposed this moral monstrosity.
Again and again, in all manner of contexts, people speak of this or that person being on either the right or wrong side of history. Francesca Albanese is on the right side of history; Ursula von der Leyen on the wrong side. Palestine Action is on the right side of history; Keir Starmer the wrong side. So on and so forth.
I understand the impulse to speak and think in this way. The genocidal campaign in Gaza, and the moral and intellectual treason of so much of the western political and media class that has facilitated it, has been a profoundly disorienting experience for millions of people.
And the growing suspicion that none of the perpetrators of this atrocity will face any kind of meaningful justice brings with it the sense that we are living in a world increasingly ungoverned by moral norms.
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It is a comfort, in such a world, to believe that we will eventually, and inevitably, arrive at some sort of reckoning, and that it will come in the form of the judgment of history.
This idea strikes me as a secular incarnation of an old belief that was once central to a Christian understanding of the world: the immortality of the soul, and the judgment, in the life to come, of one’s moral actions in this one.
“History”, understood in this way, becomes a final arbiter of rights and wrongs; the implication, for politicians and other public figures, is a secular version of the injunction that you better get right with Jesus.
When people invoke this notion now, they are drawing on a recent history that at least partly vindicates such a belief.
The greatest crime of the 20th century, and of any other, was the Holocaust. Not every perpetrator of that incalculably vast and ramifying atrocity was brought to justice; what could justice even mean, indeed, in the teeth of such a howling abyss? But there is no question that the world has come to understand it for the moral abomination that it was. Nazism, we are now agreed, was a great historical evil.
But certain counter-examples immediately call themselves to mind.
The Nazis took direct inspiration from the historical example of the United States, a country that views itself as being, almost as a matter of definition, perennially on the right side of history.
In drawing up the laws formalising the repression and persecution of Jews, Nazi legal scholars explicitly drew on the model of American race law. Before Nuremberg, there was Jim Crow. Before the Reich, and after it too, was the US.
Adolf Hitler himself, as he prepared to wage war on the eastern front to expand the territory of the Reich, often compared the project to the conquest of native lands, and the annihilation of native people, that secured the territory of the US.
In private conversations with his inner circle, he often referred to the Slavic people whose lands he intended to conquer as “redskins”, and talked of how the east would be won for Germany in much the same manner as the American west: by settlers who “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand” in that great lebensraum expansion into the continent’s interior.
In a conversation in 1941, Hitler fondly evoked the idea of a future “German east” populated by former soldiers settled on millions of homesteads. “Our Mississippi,” he insisted, “must be the Volga.” Just as the US had its manifest destiny, so too did Germany. And just as the US had been on the right side of history, so too would the 1,000-year Reich.
In 1924, indeed, as he and his fellow putschists stood trial in Munich for high treason, he invoked the judgment of history, on whose right side he firmly believed his movement to be.
“Gentlemen, it is not you who pronounce judgment upon us, it is the external court of history which will make its pronouncement upon the charge which is brought against us,” Hitler said.
“You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times, but the goddess who presides over the eternal court of history will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the public prosecutor and the verdict of this court. For she acquits us.”
Martin Luther King jnr frequently reminded his followers, and those who served their oppression, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. It’s a sentiment that – partly due to its frequent invocation by Barack Obama during his presidency – has become central to a liberal conception of the world.
Societies evolve, in this view, and become more humane as they do so. But no one knew better than King that the moral universe only bends towards justice if it is grasped and wrenched into shape by the hands of the oppressed.
The painful reality is it is entirely possible, indeed very likely, that those who have conducted the mass slaughter of Palestinians in plain sight will never be brought to any kind of justice.
After all, no one wound up in the dock for the genocide of the original Americans, for the campaigns of annihilation regarded by Hitler as a proof of concept for his own.
And the same can be said of almost all of the historical atrocities, including genocides, carried out over the centuries by European colonial powers.
Perhaps in the case of Israel, the best we can hope for is some internal reckoning, decades or even centuries from now: a future statue of Binyamin Netanyahu pulled down and pitched into the Dead Sea; a trend, generations hence, for land acknowledgments paying lip service to the half-remembered original inhabitants of some long-since settled part of the West Bank.
History does not have sides. It’s not a court case, a debate that can be won or lost on the merit of an argument or its prosecution.
History, as Stephen Dedalus remarks in Ulysses, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”.
And the nightmare of history is replete with unaccounted horrors and abominations – with genocides whose perpetrators have never been brought to justice, with nations whose creation myths make no mention of those whose slaughter was deemed necessary.
There is no right side of a nightmare, other than awakening from it.
